Friday, September 02, 2011

Libertarians don’t have to be social liberals. It is common ground that libertarians reject the initiation of force and support private property and the market. My concern was that if one adds other requirements to this definition, then those who accept the non-aggression principle and the free market but do not meet these further requirements have been wrongly excluded from libertarianism by the extended definition. We’re not defending the social liberalism but the liberty that also means fair play, a level playing field, for social conservatism. The left doesn’t believe in liberty; like the right it hates, it wants to force its agenda on you for your own good.

As much as I like the ’40s, and as fun as the movies make it look, WWII was unnecessary, argues Pat Buchanan; I agree at least for the US. Nor is Bishop Williamson evil or even heretical for studying the engineering and other science and concluding that the Nazi camps murdered ‘only’ hundreds of thousands of people. Buchanan remembers the war’s beginning 72 years ago yesterday. It would last six years, carry off scores of millions and end with Germany in ruins, half of Europe under Josef Stalin’s rule and the British Empire on the way to collapse. It may prove to be the mortal wound that brings about the death of the West. There were no plans to conquer the US. Better to let the Nazis and Soviets destroy each other. Better than Yalta. The America First Committee wasn’t pacifist either. Back then the mainliners were hawks and as recently as 1936 the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention distrustful of the government and anti-war. Hate the war; love the Greatest Generation.

Gen. Smedley Butler had already answered Churchill’s ‘so much owed by so many to so few’: War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.